Caviar to moonshine: Vermont businesses lob best pitches

The final day of FreshTrack Capital's Road Pitch was Friday, August 4, 2017, at the Green Mountain Technology Center in Hyde Park. A group of investors on motorcycles roamed the state for a week listening to the pitches from businesses.
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Iveta Sarova Parker of Mottra America, a Latvian company that wants to farm sturgeon and produce caviar in Vermont, makes her pitch presentation on the final day of FreshTrack Capital's Road Pitch on Friday, August 4, 2017, at the Green Mountain Technology Center in Hyde Park. A group of investors on motorcycles has been roaming the state for a week listening to the pitches of budding entrepreneurs looking for money. The Vermont Teddy Bear in the foreground is one of the awards presented to the pitch winner.(Photo: GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS)Buy Photo

HYDE PARK - A group of six entrepreneurs had seven minutes each to convince a room full of motorcycle-riding investors to back their business plans.

On this last day of the fourth annual Road Pitch the pitches ranged from cheese curds to caviar, from feminine sanitary products to party planners, plus a u-pick orchard and beer jelly.

Road Pitch is the brainchild of Cairn Cross, co-founder of Shelburne-based venture capital fund, FreshTracks Capital. Cross and his investor buddies ride their Harleys, BMWs and assorted other bikes to 10 Vermont towns in a week, hearing from about 50 hopeful entrepreneurs.

The pitchers last Friday had to contend with uncooperative technology that forced one of them — Caleb Magoon of Heritage Farms of Vermont — to make his pitch without the supporting graphics of his PowerPoint presentation. They also had to think on their feet, answering eight minutes worth of questions — Shark Tank style — from the investors.

Road Pitch investor Sivan Cotel, an entrepreneur himself as co-founder of Stonecutter Spirits in Middlebury, said it is the questions that benefit newly minted entrepreneurs the most by making them think critically about their business plans. Cotel has ridden in all four Road Pitch events.

"Most of the businesses are very early stage and not necessarily ready for an investor," Cotel said. "They're honing their business plans to then be ready to talk to potential investors."

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Organizer Cairn Cross speaks on the final day of FreshTracks Capital's Road Pitch on Friday, August 4, 2017, at the Green Mountain Technology Center in Hyde Park. Pitchers had seven minutes to present followed by an eight-minute Q & A. A group of investors on motorcycles has been roaming the state for a week listening to the pitches of budding entrepreneurs looking for money.(Photo: GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS)

In each town along the Road Pitch route, the investor-riders picked a winning pitch, which earned $500 and an invitation to the statewide pitch-off at Champlain College on Oct. 19. The big winner there gets a check for $5,000. And as Cross pointed out to the audience in Green Mountain Technology and Career Center in Hyde Park, these are real checks.

"Some people give those big fake checks and you can't cash them," he said. "Maybe some time in a month they give you a check. We're going to write you a real $500 check if you win."

With that, the pitching began.

First up was Magoon, who brushed off his technological problems and focused on the "huge tourist corridor" created by nearby Stowe to make his pitch.

Magoon said his family has been in Vermont for more than 200 years. He said during all that time, the men of his family have been doing "exactly three things." They have been farming, they have been soldiering, and they have been moonshining.

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Caleb Magoon pitches his idea for Heritage Farms of Vermont, an agri-tourism company, on the final day of FreshTracks Capital's Road Pitch on Friday, August 4, 2017, at the Green Mountain Technology Center in Hyde Park. A group of investors on motorcycles has been roaming the state for a week listening to the pitches of budding entrepreneurs looking for money.(Photo: GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS)

"My great great great grandfather, along with his brothers and cousins in the late 1800s were the biggest moonshiners in the state of Vermont," Magoon said.

Hence, Heritage Farms' main value-added product will be "Magoonshine."

The next business pitch came from Iveta Serova Parker of Mottra America LLC, who wants to farm sturgeon in Vermont and produce caviar for the U.S. market.

"We want to say it's an ecosystem," Parker said of her prospective fish farm. "It will be (an) indoor farm.. The main product will be sturgeon and caviar. We want to do it in a sustainable way."

Parker also plans to introduce sturgeon meat to the market, which she said is popular in Europe.

"It's a healthy and amazing product," Parker said. "Chefs love it."

The cost: $4 million to $5 million. "If somebody can write a check for that," she said, smiling.

Nancy and Walter Warner took the floor next to pitch Potlicker Kitchen, best known for its beer jelly. Nancy Warner explained the business began after the couple picked 11 pounds of strawberries at the Thetford strawberry festival in 2010.

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Stephen Trenholm of Gallagher, Flynn & Company listens to one of several pitch presentions on the final day of FreshTracks Capital's Road Pitch on Friday, August 4, 2017, at the Green Mountain Technology Center in Hyde Park. A group of investors on motorcycles has been roaming the state for a week listening to the pitches of budding entrepreneurs looking for money.(Photo: GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS)

"I made amazing classic strawberry jam, but I can buy strawberry jam," she said. "So my second batch was strawberry chipotle, a flavor profile I like better."

Warner became addicted to canning. She said she started turning everything around her into jams and jellies.

"One winter as I was canning everything in my house I ran out of fruit and I had a lot of beer," Warner said. "So I turned beer into beer jelly, and beer jelly is what really launched our business."

Walter Warner presented the numbers. The average cost of goods is $1.40. The wholesale price is $4.50, leaving a margin of 69 percent. By 2016 the gross life times sales for the company were $1.25 million, but revenue leveled off in 2015 because of "capacity constraints," Walter Warner said.

The couple has a 2,100-square-foot kitchen in an industrial park in Stowe and three employees, and they were maxed out.

"That's why we're here," Walter Warner said, making his pitch. "Our sales are limited by production capacity and short staffing. We're here to ask for your mentorship and your investment in our company as we go from a small mom-and-pop kitchen to a national specialty food brand."

Nicole Howard and Raelyn Ward of Whim of Whimsy — two moms who shared a sense of style and a passion for party planning — presented their vision next for their business renting children's birthday party supplies, followed by a mother-and-son duo, Roberta and Tyler Royer, who want to set up a mobile cheese curd production facility at their dairy farm in Troy.

"Our company is producing fresh cheese curds that's fun to eat and squeaks in your mouth, produced by some of Vermont's finest cows," Roberta Royer began her presentation.

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John Mandeville, executive director of the Lamoille County Economic Development Corporation, times a business pitch presentation on the final day of FreshTracks Capital's Road Pitch on Friday, August 4, 2017, at the Green Mountain Technology Center in Hyde Park. Each presenter had seven minutes to present followed by an eight-minute Q & A. A group of investors on motorcycles has been roaming the state for a week listening to the pitches of budding entrepreneurs looking for money.(Photo: GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS)

Flashing a photo of an idyllic roadside dairy farm on a large screen provided for the presenters, Royer explained why Nothin' but Curd was going to succeed as a business.

"Our farm sits at the foot of Jay Peak," she said, putting up a photo of the view from her barn. "Look outside our farm and you have this beautiful picture of Jay Peak."

All kinds of folks stop by the farm, Royer said. Just the other day a family from Bulgaria came by to buy raw milk.

"We have the traffic, 1,700 cars a day pass by going to Jay Peak and elsewhere," she said. "We believe we can make this work."

The final presentation of the day was by Nora DeMuth of Selene Silks, who with her wife Laura Wilkinson is making reusable and washable feminine sanitary products from organic cotton and silk.

The couple is product testing with their friends, and have not yet sold their product, but DeMuth said there's no doubt they will be the best available on the market when they launch. The pads cost $6 to make and will sell for $20, Demuth said, leaving enough margin for a business plan that anticipates giving away one pad free for every one that sells. The free pads will go to organizations such as Planned Parenthood.

"What this comes down to for us fundamentally is that our bodies are sacred, menstruation is totally natural, human and healthy," DeMuth said. "There's no reason all women and girls shouldn't have safe and comfortable periods. We want to make sure they do."

The winner in Hyde Park was Potlicker Kitchen, which means Nancy and Walter Warner will be headed to Champlain College in October. Meanwhile Cairn Cross declared Year Four of Road Pitch a success.

"Is there an opportunity for FreshTracks? That's really the reason we do this," Cross said. "And then the other riders are also looking for things on their own as angel investors. From a FreshTracks perspective, there's a couple of things to follow up on."